I finally got it to work by using 3ds Max 2009.

First, I installed the trial version of the program and then installed the matching Gamebryo plug-in. Then I realized that I needed an additional plug-in called Autodesk FBX, (which had versions to be installed for both Maya and Max) in order to import and export my .ma file without losing all of the mesh, texturing, rigging, and animation data. Having never used Max before, it was extremely difficult to get the hang of doing simple procedures that I have been taking for granted in Maya. With the time that I had, I was able to recreate the Sequences and character root with the proper editors and export the NIF, KF, and KFM files. The texturing from the FBX file was a little wonky, but I was more interested in getting the files to work with our code. I swapped in the character KFM and miracle of miracles, it worked. Then I simply tweaked the character node scale, translation, and orientation sections and added a header with the animation sequences. So now I know it is definitely something with Maya. An Emergent employee responded to my question, but his only suggestion so far was to check the filepaths, which Mark and I did yesterday. Hopefully he has some other ideas. It would be a lot easier to get it to work with Maya files rather than having to learn the entire Max package from scratch.

As Mark and I mentioned before, it's unfortunate that the Gamebryo documentation is not written for first-time users. A lot of features that were advertised as being simple ended up taking much longer to implement because of missing or hidden information. We definitely learned a lot from this crash-course semester with a powerful toolkit.